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WHITE HOUSE MEETING: Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeop are among those who have persuaded Trump not to attack Iran. The photo is from another occasion. Photo: Anna Moneymaker / THE NEW YORK TIMES
The outgoing US president is said to have asked his closest advisers if it was possible to attack Iran’s nuclear power plant in the coming weeks, according to The New York Times newspaper.
The newspaper writes that Donald Trump brought together several of America’s most powerful men in the Oval Office late last week.
The president is said to have wanted to know what options he had to attack Iran immediately, but he is said to have spoken out on the idea of an attack.
In the room were Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller, and General Mark A. Milley. According to the newspaper, they have explained to Trump that an attack on the regional superpower can quickly escalate to a major conflict in Trump’s final months in the White House.
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The day before Thursday’s meeting, international inspectors monitoring Iran’s nuclear program had reported a “significant increase” in Iran’s uranium reserves at one of the country’s most important nuclear facilities, Natanz, on the outskirts. from the capital, Tehran. Lower levels of enriched uranium can be used for peaceful purposes, as fuel in nuclear power plants, while higher levels of enriched uranium can be used in nuclear weapons.
Five years have passed since the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the EU negotiated the historic nuclear deal with Iran.
The agreement provides international information on Iran’s nuclear program and places heavy restrictions on it. In return, economic sanctions against Iran were lifted.
An important purpose of the agreement was to eliminate the suspicion that Iran was secretly planning to develop nuclear weapons. Iranian leaders have repeatedly said that they do not want such weapons.
From the beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump was very skeptical of the agreement, and in 2018 he announced that the United States was withdrawing from it. Since then, the United States has reintroduced tough sanctions against Iran.
CRITICAL DESTRUCTION: A satellite image of the Natanz nuclear plant after the explosion in early July. The centrifuges at the plant must have been hit. Photo: Reuters
This summer, a fire at the Natanz plant destroyed a building where centrifuges for nuclear power production are kept. The international analysts VG spoke to at the time thought that Israel, with the United States behind it, was most likely behind the sabotage operation.
Renowned German analyst Fabian Hinz, a researcher at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in California and an expert on Iran’s nuclear program, said he believed more types of attacks would be carried out in the future.
According to sources from the New York Times, Trump will still consider other options to attack Iran in the final weeks of his presidency, although a direct attack from the United States no longer appears to be an option.
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Also towards the end of the Bush administration in 2008, Israel is said to have sought the help and support of the United States for an attack on Iran’s nuclear program. At the time, Israel, which views Iran as its arch enemy, feared that a new Obama-led administration would be less willing to support an Israeli attack on Iran.
The United States came very close to a major conflict with Iran in early 2020, after Trump ordered the assassination of Iran’s most powerful general, Qassem Suleimani. Iran responded to the attack by sending rockets to bases with US troops in Iraq, but at the time a major conflict was avoided.
